Hansen admits: ‘Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998′

A strong La Niña lowered the world’s temperature last year to its second-coolest reading of the 2000s, federal scientists announced Thursday.

The nations’s two primary climate data sets — from the National Climatic Data Center and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) — both had the Earth as much warmer than average, but not as warm as recent years have been.

The climate center reported that the globe had its 11th-warmest year on record, while NASA marked the year as the 9th warmest on record.
Climate records go back to 1880.

La Niña is a natural, periodic cooling of tropical Pacific Ocean water that affects weather and climate around the world.

Since 2011 was the second-coolest year of the 2000s, does this mean global warming has slowed?

“Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998,” NASA climate scientist James Hansen admits in the GISS report. However, he adds that nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred in the 21st century, and that 2011 was cooled by a moderately strong La Niña.

“We conclude that the slowdown of warming is likely to prove illusory, with more rapid warming appearing over the next few years,” Hansen writes.

NCDC calculated the globe’s average temperature was 57.9 degrees F, which was 0.9 degrees warmer than the 20th century average of 57 degrees.

“There is no long-term cooling trend,” said climate scientist Jake Crouch of the NCDC. “If we look at the long-term trend of temperatures for the globe, we see an increasing trend,” he says. “However, La Niña can temporarily supress global temperatures.”

In fact, it was hotter than every year in the 20th century except 1998. When compared to previous La Niña years, the 2011 global surface temperature was the warmest observed.
It was the 35th consecutive year that the global temperature was above average, according to the data center. The last below-average year was 1976.

Specifically, 2011 was the warmest year on record in Spain and Norway, and the second-warmest on record for the United Kingdom.

NCDC reported the USA’s temperature was the 23rd-warmest on record in 2011. What was remarkable for the USA were the precipitation contrasts: Texas had its driest year on record, while seven states — Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — had their wettest year on record.

The NCDC also upped the number of billion-dollar U.S. weather disasters from 12 to 14, adding Tropical Storm Lee and a severe weather outbreak in the Rockies and Midwest from July to the total.

“Climate records go back to 1880″. Given this very short time span, only 132 years, a tiny data set, how can any scientist make a purposeful statement about “average” temperatures therein? Or, for that matter, about “extremes”? I suppose if you are sufficiently anthropocentric, 132 years might seem a long time, but . . .

Of course the alarmists are using temperature measuring methods so diverse in their variability over time, that all of the data is meaningless for the low level changes they claim indicate a damagingh long term trend. It is not just the headline writers of the major media outlets that are biased, but the writing, proofing, editing, and publication of such dishonest non-scientific data is beyond absurd. It is unforgiveable the lack of any healthy skeptiscism in today’s reporters. These people don’t even exhibit a mild curiosity but just ingest the garbage, amplify, and spew it upon the masses.

You are absolutely correct. The topic of Gage R&R garners blank stares from most of the “scientists” I have met. I can only imagine the list of random variables impacting temperature measurements from 130 years ago.

Your headline for this story is genuinely misleading. What the story really reports is very strong evidence of the exact sort of warming world global warming theory predicts given massive human GHG emission. 2011 was warmer than any year in the 20th century except for 1998. It was the 35th year in a row that was above the 20th century average. And 9 of the 10 warmest years in the record have occurred in the 21st century. If you’re trying to show Jim Hansen admitting that the planet’s cooled since 1998, you can claim this is only by ignoring almost everything else in the article. 2011 was the warmest La Nina year on record. It was a year of record breaking weather disasters. It was among the hottest years ever. All of these things are very, very troublesome. Personally I think people like Steve Milloy are guilty of something very like crimes against humanity. But even by the loosest standards of evidence and journalistic ethics, the spinning of this article the way it is here is egregiously misleading and unethical. Have you no shame?

Since we know that the temperature record starts at the end of the “Little Ice Age,” and we have never had thermometers in any of the previous Warm Periods (The Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, etc), we don’t know (a) how long these Warm Periods typically last or (b) what their actual SCALE is. If you start measuring at the bottom of a multi-decadal sinusoidal wave and continue measuring through it’s peak – you won’t know the peak until you are well down the other side of the wave. There IS a “flat spot” at the top where your trend will reduce to zero prior to the fall. IF the current temperature “plateau” is actually a “peak” in a warming/cooling cycle, then in another 20 years or so, we should see falling temperatures – and Milloy goes from someone guilty of “crimes against humanity” to someone who followed the data and avoided the hysteria. You, on the other hand, would be guilty of crimes “against humanity” for consigning the world’s poor to poverty and death rather than advocating for cheap energy and development!

You’re kind of behind the curve there, buddy. Richard Muller the former dean of cliamte skeptics used to advance similar arguments about the unreliabiity of the global temp record all the time. In fact he made such a convincing case that the record was too fraught with variables that the Koch brothers staked him to about $3 million and told him to lay waste to the IPCC and the “alarmists”. He put together a big ole computer program to factor in all the variables from all the reporting stations, and what he found is rather surprising, to denialists. He published a letter about this study to the WSJ and admitted that he had been wrong and the temperature data really does show a rapidly warming planet. Then he went before Congress and told them the same thing he told the WSJ. Read it and weep, Morono.

1934 was the warmest year in the history of the USA; look it up. Stan, you should publish your theory in “Nature” or “Science”. It sounds very impressive, almost like you know what you’re talking about. You should contact the Pentagon, NASA and Munich Re (world’s biggest insurance firm). They’re all worrying themselves sick about global warming, and I’m sure you’re breakthrough theory about inacuracies and uncertainties in the global temperature record would ease their minds, a lot. Heck , you might even be nominatedb for the Nobel Prize! I mean I feel a LOT a better now too. Thanks! Whew! Who’d of thunk that the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the GISS, the Nobel Prize committee and 98% of working climate scientists could have been so far off? All those danged scientists, what do they know? I bet you have interesting hypotheses about thermodynamics and evolution too. I mean, those are only theories, and they’ve had about the same amount of research done to substantiate them as global warming theory. You may have put humankind on a course away from the abyss toward which we are currently headed.

The reason the talk is about temperature rankings is because they can’t talk about temperature increases. So, I claim I can get my Prius to 120 mph. To prove it, I start accelerating, and sure enough, soon I’m at 100mph. But then for the next 10 seconds, I’m still at 100mph. So I say ‘Hey, my last ten seconds have been the fastest 10 seconds’. Then I run out of gas and start slowing down. But for the next 50 seconds, every second I claim that while this second is slower than the last, and slower than 10 seconds ago, it is still faster than the average of the 100 seconds that ended when I finished accelerating.

The temperature went up. I don’t think anybody argues that. The temperature has stopped going up. I don’t think scientists are arguing that, although I just had an argument with a guy in my office who is certain temperatures are higher this year than last, and last year than the previous, and have increased the last decade “exactly as predicted”.

The question is whether this is a new trend, or a short-term anomaly.

I don’t know. But what I DO know is that the models which we are using to tell us that we are screwed, none of them told me that this decade would have flat temperatures. If they didn’t predict the last 10 years, I don’t know why I am supposed to accept as fact that they will predict the next 100 years.

Maybe there is something happening that the models can’t model. Maybe we should figure that out before we destroy economies and ruin people’s standards of living. More importantly, maybe we should make sure we aren’t actually entering a cooling cycle (much more dangerous than warming) before we take drastic steps to stop “warming”.

My car, it was going so fast, so I put on the brakes. Right before it ran out of gas. If I only hadn’t put on the brakes, I could have drifted over the top of the hill, and rolled to the gas station. It’s not enough to take action — we have to make sure we take the RIGHT action.